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It's hard to imagine a filmmaker who has less in common with playwright Terence Rattigan than Terence Davies, whose visually lush and aurally rapturous studies of working-class British life are far removed from those crisp, clench-jawed dramas and comedies of the 1950s.

Yet there's a heartbreakingly melancholic quality to The Deep Blue Sea, arguably Rattigan's finest work, that we see in films such as Distant Voices, Still Lives and the Long Day Closes, which is undoubtedly what attracted Davies to adapting his first stage work for the big screen.

Not surprisingly, the famously single-minded Davies has not bowed down to the conventions of the well-made play. Rather, he's wrenched Rattigan's tale of love and desire in the face of social convention into his own aesthetic universe, rearranging the narrative, cutting pages of dialogue and imposing his signature dreamy, expressionistic style.

Lovers of traditional British theatre will find The Deep Blue Sea challenging. However, those alive to the expressive power of pure cinema, in which a beam of light falling on a bit of grubby wallpaper or voices raised in a pub singalong has as much meaning as a bit of perfectly enunciated dialogue, will be swept up by Davies' version of Rattigan's play.

Davies sticks to the broad outlines of the original, which opens with the wife of an eminent judge, Hester Collyer (Rachel Weisz) attempting to take her own life using sleeping pills and a coin-operated gas meter in her run-down London apartment.

However, Davies tumbles back over the previous months, telling the story of how Hester fell head over heels in love with rakish former RAF-pilot Freddie Page (Tom Hiddleston), who, after the initial rush of their illicit coupling has cooled, now spends his time drinking and playing golf.

Davies also gives us a glimpse of Hester's dull and constrictive marriage to the older Sir William Collyer (a rare big-screen appearance for stage legend Simon Russell Beale), culminating in an excruciatingly funny dinner with the judge's domineering mother (Barbara Jefford).

It's not surprising that the vivacious, intelligent Hester rushed into the arms of Battle of Britain hero Freddie. While William represents crushingly repressive class-conscious old Blighty, his wife is rushing headlong toward the sexual revolution to come and Freddie is a new kind of Englishman.

But Freddie does not love Hester as deeply as Hester loves Freddie and this is her problem. She's in a long line of movie heroines for whom love and desire are everything and who is willing to sacrifice the comforts of a middle-class marriage for the thrill of unfettered passion - that is, until the perfume of lust is replaced by the stench of real life.

While Davies has lost much of Rattigan's famously brittle dialogue, his recreation of postwar Britain, with its air of exhaustion and deprivation, takes us deep into the soul of Hester, whose education and classiness have led her to expect so much more.

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Movie Review: The Deep Blue Sea

BY JEFF GORDON stltoday.com | Posted: Monday, March 19, 2012 6:36 am | (Loading) comments.

Mizzou fans are still reeling today. SLU fans are a bit disappointed, too, after the Billikens failed to wrestle a victory from Michigan State on Sunday.

But the college basketball industry got just what it wanted from the first weekend of the NCAA Tournament.

Stunning upsets reinforced the March Madness theme. Norfolk State, Lehigh and The Ohio University played the Cinderella role and joined college basketball lore.

They wrecked brackets, engaged casual fans and justified the expansion of Division I basketball to three times its appropriate size.

Several power programs advanced to the Sweet 16, including Kentucky, Syracuse, North Carolina, Ohio State, Kansas and Michigan State. Those schools fill arenas and stadiums and pay the bills.

Double-digit seeds Ohio, North Carolina State and Xavier also survived the second round to add some variety to the proceedings and keep the storylines fresh.

(Downtown St. Louis merchants probably arent thrilled to get two of the surprise teams visiting this weekend, but the roving horde of Jayhawk fans ought to cover most of that gap. They will be pulling for KU big time Friday night.)

Here is what the experts had to say about what happened the past four days:

Eamonn Brennan, ESPN.com: Combined, Duke and Missouri wield well over 100 million in their combined athletic budgets; their overall university endowments dwarf that of Lehigh and Norfolk State and any other No. 15 seed you'll ever see. The Blue Devils and Tigers are members of the entrenched college sports aristocracy, the dominion of top-100 recruiting and charter jets and shoe-company contracts and greed-laden conference realignment and billion-dollar television deals. Lehigh and Norfolk State don't exist in this universe. These schools' recruits aren't elite AAU prospects. Oftentimes, they aren't really prospects at all.

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Tipsheet: March Madness marketing bonanza

Exclusivity. Its one of those things you cant put a price on. Er, or rather, you can. Usually an ENORMOUS one.

Designer purses, hand-tooled leather shoes, finely tailored suits; in the fashion world, being unique costs big. Same thing for cars . . . most of the time.

Now, if you run out and plonk down 60 or 70 grand on an E-Class Mercedes or 5-series BMW, its going to take all of five minutes before you find yourself parking at the mall next to somebody who bought the exact same car, except in a nicer trim level. So save your money. If you really want to stand out, buy a Nissan.

Specifically, this Nissan right here. Its the Maxima, and its one of those cars that youll only find one or two of in stock at your local dealership, and few out on the roads. Nissan doesnt build or sell a lot of them, although it maintains that its the flagship sedan for the brand.

The problem is two-fold. First, Nissan has at least two flagship cars already: for performance, the GT-R, and for green creds, the all-electric Leaf. The Maxima tends to get overshadowed by these well-publicized giants.

Second, cost. When launched in 2009, the redesigned Maxima SV had a price that lapped right up against the bottom pricing-rungs of the Infiniti G37 sedan. Add Infinitis often-aggressive lease rates into the mix, and the Maxima actually becomes more expensive than a comparably equipped G.

For 2012, Nissan has reduced the price of the Maxima somewhat. As tested, this SV Sport is now $40,230 before freight, and base models start at $37,880, down $1,920 since last year.

Still, thats a lot of coin to spend on a Nissan. Is it worth it? I certainly think so, and heres why.

Design

When sculpting a car, designers often give a name to the style theyre trying to achieve. For the new-for-09 Maxima, the concept was liquid motion.

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Maxima worth the price

Washington, March 16 (IANS) You might feel like giving a beggar a coin when you are passing by him but then quickly suppress the feeling. This could put you at the risk of acting immorally.

For instance, as an experiment shows, such lose a bit of their commitment to morality.

"Compassion is such a powerful emotion. It's been called a moral barometer," said Daryl Cameron, the journal Psychological Science reports.

"In past work, we've shown that people suppress their compassion when faced with mass suffering in natural disasters and genocide.

To the degree that suppressing compassion changes how people care about or think about morality, it may put them more at risk for acting immorally," said Cameron.

He co-authored the study with Keith Payne, both psychology researchers from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, according to a North Carolina statement.

They showed each study participant in their experiment a slideshow of 15 images of subjects including homeless people, crying babies, and victims of war and famine.

Each participant was given one of three tasks. Some were told to try not to feel sympathy, some were told to try not to feel distress and the rest were told to experience whatever emotions come to them.

People who had suppressed compassion did, apparently, have a change in their sense of morality: they were much more likely to either care less about being moral or to say that it's all right to be flexible about following moral rules.

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Suppressing compassion might make you act immorally

In Insert Coin, we look at an exciting new tech project that requires funding before it can hit production. If you'd like to pitch a project, please send us a tip with "Insert Coin" as the subject line. Granted, claims by the JuiceTank's creators that their product is "the first ever iPhone charger and case in one" may be a bit overblown, but its design is certainly novel enough to make us give it a second look. The product looks like a pretty standard hard-shelled iPhone 4 / 4S case from the front -- flip it over though, and you'll see two charging prongs embedded in the back. Click the button just below and they'll pop up, allowing you to plug the handset directly into the wall -- no cords or separate chargers needed. Of course, this initial version is made specifically for North American-type outlets, so if you live outside the region or travel a lot, the novelty might be lost on you. If you're covered, however, you can pick up a limited edition green version by being one of the first 400 people to pledge $40 or more. Check out a video explanation / plea after the break. Previous project update: Still time to get in on some of that robot fighting action -- 21 days to be exact. Currently the Mech Warfare Robot Arena is at $2,441 pledged out of a goal of $6,000.

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Insert Coin: JuiceTank is a two-pronged iPhone case